It it often hard to understand the idea that “Life is an illusion,” that what we see and experience in the outer, physical world, is not the truth of life. Yet if you consider that all matter arises from the realms of energy, then the physical world (creation) can be understood as merely a reflection of those energies. To get beyond the “illusion” of the physical, is to become connected to the energies, and to know the purposes, that give rise to physical creation. And humans are designed to do just that. (At the end of this post there are instructions and a link to download this recording to your computer.)

Jeane:I dreamed a lot last night, but I only remember the last dream, which seems to have two parts to it.

In the initial part of this dream I seem to go into a room. It’s kind of a large bare room with wooden floors, kind of light colored – whitish colored. I’ve gone into the room and there’s a group of men in there wearing Galabiyas and one of the men is a twirler. And I even see him twirling except the only difference is it’s almost like he has a cloth that’s just been put over his head and tucked into the Galabiya. It’s not like a hood. It’s more like a cloth that covers his whole head, so you don’t see his face at all.

I think the cloth that covers his head is purple, and at some point when I’m in there they accuse me of having stolen the twirler. I think I still see him, but I mean, I’m accused of having stolen him.

That’s the first half of the dream.

John: The twirler is a consciousness that exists inside of you, which is veiled. And you find yourself in existence accepting the fact that somehow that is gone, or missing, or stolen, but inside of you is the consciousness that is able to proceed through life, in creation, without being affected by the illusion of things in terms of the reflections of the outer.

In other words, you can see through that. You can see through the veils that that seems to present based upon reflections. In other words, the twirler, or the consciousness, is hidden within or underneath all that exists in creation, or in manifestation. Underneath, or from inside of that, is an essence of all that there is, and it only appears to be stolen away or veiled. It’s there for those with eyes to see.

Jeane:In the next part of the dream it feels like, again, a man wearing a Galabiya whose face I don’t really see, takes me over to what looks like a drafting desk. It feels like there’s some work people want me to do, but the drafting paper and the designs on the table are covered up with a sheet of paper. So it’s almost like they want me to do some work, but they don’t want me to see what’s being done.

I kind of lift up just a corner of the paper, even though they’ve told me not to do anything, so that I can kind of peek at the designs on the paper. And then I kind of look at the guy and I tell him I’ve got it figured out, even though maybe they didn’t want me to look, and they don’t want me to know it. You know, I’m going to tell him what’s going on.

John: In creation everything is at a different and slower vibration, so technically, light itself, which is at another all inclusive speed, and things in creation are at a lower, denser speed, remain hidden. And it’s assumed that you’re not supposed to be able to catch up with that when you are in creation. In other words, that’s the presumption that is generally taken for granted by most people who see themselves in this lesser capacity.

Nothing in manifestation, in terms of the senses, and the appearances, and the mind, take you anywhere. In other words, it’s not like those are the tools that you use in order to realize what needs to be realized as the actual realness that exists.

But there’s a way that you can peek, and you can see behind the curtain of all of that, in order to take the steps you need to take. And once you’ve figured that out, just you taking and discovering what needs to be discovered, creates a peeling away of the veils, a revealing. In other words, you bring something of a clarity or a light into an inflection, and this reaches beyond, or is a step that takes one beyond, the appearances that everyone else has bought into and takes for granted.

To download this file, Right Click (for PCs) or Control Click (for Macs) and Save: Beyond Appearances

John:In my dream I come home to find a group of thieves on my roof. I had placed carpets on the roof while I figured out where they belonged, and the thieves are throwing them down, onto the ground below. Once down, they can steal them, but I surprise them in the middle of what they’re doing.

I yell up at them that I’m going to call the cops, figuring that will make them stop. But when I go inside, I realize the phone has been tampered with. I figure if someone is going to go to that much trouble, they’re a real danger – so I take off running.

I run and run, knowing that, from their perspective, there’s a need to prevent me from making a report. That way they can finish the job without any concerns.

Eventually, I’m caught by one of the men in an open area. I manage to push him off and take off running again. This guy is much faster than I am, so I run inside a store, where an attendant is sitting behind a cage, walled off from the rest of the store for protection.

I plead with this man to call the cops because this other man is there to kill me. The thief can’t kill me in front of the attendant – he needs to drag me off – so the thief tells the attendant that I’m delusional and that he’s there to put me away.

The naïve clerk believes him. As circumstances would have it, a big, burly janitor comes in through the backdoor. I’m wondering whether the attendant called the janitor for backup, or he just came in by accident?

Whatever the circumstances may be, the man who’s after me is able to become buddy-buddy with the janitor, who’s just a big, simple guy. The two of them walk away as if on a break.

I know the thief is just covering his bases, making sure he has no witnesses, so I tell the clerk that the janitor is going to get killed. I know that means that the clerk is next because the thief can’t leave anyone to identify him.

With all this going on, I take off again, running through all kinds of different areas. Eventually I come to a spot where there’s a house. When I look inside, I see a group of men plotting to do some nefarious thing. They’re no immediate danger to me, but what they’re looking to do is not right either. This confuses me. Where can I turn for help?

I find myself again looking for a place to hide because help is nowhere to be found.

This is an interesting dream, and I’m just now realizing that it’s sort of the story of my life. When I used to go into courthouses and find properties that needed some problem resolved, by some quirk in my nature I also tended to look at everything that was going on in the system. If I found anything to be really out of whack, I would try and fix it.

Eventually I realized that it was impossible to fix those things because the people who had the responsibility were corrupt. I couldn’t turn to them for an answer. The deeper I looked, there’d be an even deeper fundamental problem. So I had to learn to keep what I knew to myself.

This dream seems to have that same pattern to it. It starts off with me discovering that something has become aware that I’m keeping things of great usefulness and value, even though I haven’t figured out where they belong (symbolized by the carpets on the roof). If there’s an attempt to take these things of value, there’s nothing I can do about it because no one will believe me.

Wherever I turn, I either find too great a state of innocence (the attendant and the janitor), because they just don’t function at that level, or they’re too corrupt. The corrupt can’t offer help because they’re off on their own tangential deviation.

How does this apply to my situation? Well, there’s something moving inside me where there’s a powerful insight, value, knowingness, or presence, or however you’d describe it, which has importance in ways I don’t fully appreciate yet. This has been exposed or discovered and that causes me to seek help.

This reminds me of the issue I recently had of exposing too much spiritual or esoteric knowledge to a person who wasn’t ready for it (see Pearls before Swine). And it reflects the issue of why so many esoteric teachings remain hidden: people are often too innocent to absorb it or, if they comprehend it, it’s too upsetting to their worldview and they want to destroy it.

That leaves any holder of such knowledge to either continually stay on the run, so to speak, or to remain hidden.

So in the dream, the things of value are on the roof, the highest part of the house, which symbolically speaks to the idea of something not being incorporated into the multilevel aspects of the life (house) of a human, i.e., the lower (basement, first floor) and higher aspects (second floor and above).

And, once these things of value become an inner knowing, can they be kept safe, whether from the outer world, or from the lower aspects in me (the thief)? Ultimately there’s nowhere in the external world to turn for a resolution to this dilemma, it can only come from within. I have to provide its safety in me.

Jeane:In my dream it feels like I’m living in a room on an estate. Everything seems to be right there for me. I’ve had a baby; I think it’s a male, but I’m not sure. I think the father is Jack Nicholson, or someone like him; he visits occasionally – by coming down from the sky.

When I had the baby, I didn’t really know the father’s true nature, but he’s a bit on the dark side. When he visits, I always keep myself between the baby and him.

The next time he visits, I find myself swirling around in this giant, shallow sink, and I think that’s when I wake up.

John: I saw the meaning of this dream right off the bat, but the difficulty is, how do I describe it?

You’re dealing with a force in the outer world (represented by Jack Nicholson) that’s part of the ego-identity illusion. You also have the reciprocal, inner force, in the form of the baby. You’re standing in between them, protecting the baby.

For whatever reason you’ve chosen the image of Jack Nicholson to represent the outer world, perhaps because he has such a powerful identity.

Jeane: It’s almost like I want to start taking the baby out into the world, but I feel confined a bit by the Jack Nicholson energy.

John: Exactly. This image is another example of “solitude in the crowd,” or “head in the heavens, feet on the ground,” or however you’d say that. You’re using an image that has the schematic of this dichotomy between the spiritual and the physical, or the inner and the outer. The baby represents an essence, and Jack Nicholson represents an ego-type, external identification, and you’re caught in between.

So you’re neither the essence, nor the identification and, as a result, you’re in a state of amnesia. The baby is the unconscious part of you, and Jack Nicholson is the part that tries to keep involving you in making choices based in personal indulgences (psychologies, old patterns, etc.) in terms of your relationship to people and things around you.

It’s much like your dream earlier in the night (see The Lost Essence), in that you’re trying to understand how to make a fundamental shift that, really, all humans should be working toward. This is a shift from being based, as a being, in the personal, egocentric “I’m separate” view, where life consists in our personal reactions to events in the outer world, to being present in the outer world, but based in the inner, universe-connected part of us.

Your dreams don’t have the specificity of an answer, they just show the conundrum from an overall perspective, which is the way the feminine sees things (the masculine would present this issue through specific details). The image shows you have the sense of something so much more (the baby), but at the same time you’re not quite able to catch up with it because you also have the circumstances of this outer scenario (JN) that you’re taking into account.

So how do you pull the two together? How does everything come back to just the essence and yet, at the same time, you don’t destroy the creation (physical world) with the light. In other words, how do exist in the essence without disturbing anything?

Very unusual and peculiar. See, it’s very much like that “poof” dream at the beginning. The interesting thing about experiencing a dream image like this is it keeps you from taking things too seriously because, by and large, you always have the inner echo to remind you that the outer world is just an appearance or mannerism.

There’s always something behind the mannerism or appearance that has to do with where it’s coming from (the essence). The more we connect with the essence of things, the harder it becomes to take the appearance or the mannerism of the outer literally. If we catch up with the essence, on an inner level, then we’ll see what’s causing everything in the outer world to unfold.

When we experience life at this deeper level, it’s like we’re creating, or co-creating, the world we experience. No, we’re actually creating. This co-creation thing isn’t quite right, because we are God. It’s hidden inside us. We can’t not be everything.

God divides Himself completely, which means that there’s no division. God is always whole and complete in and of Himself. If we can catch up with it in us, then we’re also catching up with that which is at the center of the universe, which is the essence of everything.

We’re the Big Bang, or whatever science wants to call it. We’re all of that, but it’s hard to denote because we’re caught in a magic trick, like in your dream, where you have the baby, which is the essence, and you have the raw energy of things that capture your attention, which is the Jack Nicholson outer, and you’re somewhere in between.

So, we’re always caught in something like that. Our relationship to the outer is informed by our five senses, but our relationship to the inner comes through an emptiness connection from the heart, or from the essence. It’s that inner part that’s always making a journey, not what we’re doing in relation to our outer environment.

Again, it’s a big overall dream, at such a level and of such magnitude that it’s like a trance. It’s not something that you can take and say “I’ve got it!” in one fell swoop. But it is a good representation of how things really are.